Sony Ericsson W800i Review

Overall Rating

Bright and clear screen.
Flexible and easy to use text messaging.
Interesting colour.
Lense cover for camera.
Completely personalisable caller pictures and ringtones.
Large editable dictionary.

Text messages can't extend beyond a single text.
Location of microphone means person on other end hears all surrounding noise during call.
Need an extra lead plugged in to use radio and/or earphones.

This is a great all-round phone.
Making calls and receiving calls is fine, though the size and shape of the phone, together with the location of the microphone make your listeners prone to external noise. Also, for some reason, the font size chosen by Sony means all UK numbers extend onto two lines when typing in... hardly a deal breaker, but odd nonetheless.
The MP3 quality is great if you have some headphones plugged in, if a little tinny through the external speaker. It is easy to arrange tunes into albums, and the one-click Walkman button works well, with virtually zero delay; it can be set up to either play the latest tune you were listening to, or the radio, or which ever you had on last... but alas, if it tries to play radio without the antenna cord attached, it pops up an error message - this would have been better if it intelligently realised you probably wanted mp3 rather than radio at this point. The radio itself is good, with channel presets, RDS and easy navigation. The quality is dependent on reception via your antenna cable (also used for plugging your earphones into (and as a hands-free microphone I think!).
The screen is bright and crystal clear, meaning you can have great backdrops. I like to generate images that are pixel-for-pixel the same resolution as the screen, and they look really good. Resized images also look great, without unsightly blurring. The pictures it takes with the camera, if you've got a steady hand, are really rather good for 2megapixel, and the flash works pretty well. The lense cover's great too, to protect it from dust (something missing from the later W810i). The only downside to the camera is the delay between pressing the button and the picture being taken. In fact, the display freezes on what you would think was the image taken, but then updates to be the real image, which, if the subject is moving, won't be what you expected. As the actual camera sound occurrs *before* the picture's taken, your subject thinks you're finished before you are.
The phone can record video with sound, with pretty good compression, but the resolution isn't great. I've actually used mine to play entire episodes of Red Dwarf though, that I've resized to the correct resolution and copied across to the memory stick. They work really well, though a lot of sound and image updating can cause it to stutter... a consequence of the read-speed from the memory card. There is no such limitation reading from internal memory, but with only 32mb free internal memory, it's not quite enough to store a 40mb+ half-hour movie file. I am receiving a hi-speed memory card shortly, so hopefully this little issue will be resolved (maybe I should've written this then!).
The cable allows easy sending of pictures, music and other files to it, with the phone appearing as a removable hard drive once Windows has installed the necessary drivers. The phone comes with a CD with software on, for this kind of thing, but I've not tried it - I prefer raw file manipulation. I use mine to view basic html renditions of data I need (though the HTML engine doesn't support frames).
Texting is easy and flexible, multiple word options appearing in a scrollable list, with each word returnable to once you've moved on. The dictionary remembers far more words than in previous phones I've owned, and allows manual editing in case you accidentally added a mis-spelt word. Switching from all-number-input and back is a few button presses more than you'd desire. There is a limitation of the texts in that they cannot exceed a single message size, which isn't too small, and tells you you're heading for the limit 20 characters beforehand, but nonetheless, can be a pain when you've a lot to say (maybe you should just call at that point!).
As for the software elements on the phone, such as basic picture editing, basic video editing, and a MusicDJ ringtone creator, I can't really comment, as I've never bothered. There are plenty of other applications too, such as stopwatch, calendar, alarm, etc.
The basic games that come with it are very average, and I've only downloaded one since, so can't say much here - I don't think it's particularly fast compared to some phones, so you're not really going to be using it for emulation or hi-speed action games.
Finally, you can use it purely as a music device if you like, without the telephone part, meaning it is safe on aeroplanes.